Whispers Through a Megaphone (10 page)

“Would you like a cup of tea? I only have UHT milk.”

“You have tea-making facilities?”

“I’ll show you.” He leads the way to the other side of the shed, where they both stare at his tiny camping stove and kettle. “I bought these yesterday. I only have one mug at the moment, so we’ll have to have one cup at a time. Ladies first.”

He makes her a cup of tea in a mug he bought from Starbucks and fetches the wooden chair for her to sit on. She looks even paler than when she arrived, probably due to her laryngitis. “You sit here,” he says, glancing at Treacle, who is busy watching a blackbird.

“Oh no, that’s your chair.”

“It’s not mine, I just found it in the shed. I have no idea who it belongs to. Have a seat.”

“Thank you.”

She sips the tea and he sits on the floor, stroking Treacle’s head.

“This tea is nice,” Miriam says, holding the mug with both hands.

“Is it okay?”

“It’s lovely.”

“That’s good.”

A man, a woman, a cat. Three hearts, eight legs, three noses, one tail. Seventy-five years of accumulated life. Put it all together and what do you get? You get this:

A man rinsing out a mug and making a second cup of tea for a woman he has just met. A woman who has braved the
outside world after three years of self-imposed imprisonment. A man whose rational thoughts have been suspended like freshly washed sheets, blowing in the wind, just blowing in the wind.

“I suppose I should be going soon,” Miriam says.

“Somewhere to be?”

“Not really.”

“Don’t rush off on my account.”

“You probably want to get back to your guitar.”

Ralph opens a packet of Maltesers. “Would you like one?”

“No thank you. I’ve eaten so much rubbish today. I went to the cinema.”

“I haven’t been to the cinema for ages. Actually, the last film I saw was
Beautiful Lies
. I’ve got a bit of a thing for Audrey Tautou.”

“I liked her in
Amélie
. She was good.”

“Very.”

Miriam sips her tea. Ralph watches her. “Are you taking anything for your throat?” he says.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve lost your voice.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I always speak like this.”

“Oh God, I’m really sorry. I just assumed you had laryngitis or something.”

Second person today.

“Nope.”

“Right.”

“I’m so used to talking like this, it’s just what I do. I think that’s what happens when you do something for a long time. It becomes who you are.”

He puffs through his nose again. A laugh of recognition.
How right you are, says the puffing, which is followed by real words: “You’re absolutely right,” he says.

Miriam looks up. She is not used to being absolutely right. “What have you been doing for a long time?” she asks, because she thinks she ought to. The laugh of recognition invites a question. It says ask me, go on, ask me why I’m puffing,
go on
.

Ralph tries to find words to describe the things he has been doing for a long time, but there are no words. He closes his eyes and sees sheets blowing in the wind, a dark cafe, a plate full of croissants.

“I’ve finished my tea,” Miriam says. “Shall I wash this out?”

“I’ll do it.”

“Oh, okay.”

As he rinses the cup with mineral water, he pictures more of the dark cafe, its walls lined with black-and-white photos. He knows he has been there before, this image isn’t from a film or a TV programme, but he can’t recall when. He would normally be frustrated by this, by not being able to remember, but he lets it go. He is tired of trying to work things out. All that effort for what?

Ralph was in that cafe with Julie Parsley. They ordered two coffees, two croissants. It was the day they said goodbye. He will not remember this moment until a week from now, when he will stroll into a different cafe, looking for Julie. When he does remember he will try not to cry, despite the shocking impulse, the
overwhelming
desire. He will straighten his back and walk across the room. She will see him, stand up, place her lips on his cheek.

“It’s quite nice out here,” Miriam says.

“Peaceful.”

“Mmnn.” She crosses her legs. “Do you mind if I tell you something?”

Don’t do it, Miriam. He’s not interested in your boring stories.

“Not at all,” he says, pouring hot water into the mug.

She checks his face for sincerity but it’s a pointless move; her gauge has always been faulty. “I hadn’t left my house for three years,” she says. “Until today.”

“Really?”

She nods.

“Three years?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been ill?”

“No, not ill.” Oh dear. Now he is inspecting
her
face. Why is everyone so convinced that she is ill?

He notices her shiver. “Are you cold?” he says, walking into the shed. He comes back out with his cardigan. “Here, have this.”

“Oh no, it’s all right,” she says, but it’s too late. His cardigan is around her shoulders, thick and heavy and smelling of aftershave, and he is sitting on the floor, dipping a teabag into a mug of hot water.

A man’s cardigan.
On her
. She wants to shake it off.

“Shall I tell you something strange too?” he says.

“Okay.”

“I’ve just walked away from my life.”

She frowns. What on earth does he mean by this? If his life is elsewhere then what is keeping him alive? What is pushing blood around his body? She thinks of little Tom in
The Awakening
, dead and alive, only visible to Florence and his mother. We can’t walk away from our lives. We simply can’t. How did we all end up like this, constantly saying things that are completely untrue? To walk away from life would be to die and this man is clearly not dead. Or is he?

“Have you?” Miriam says. Her whispers are tiny stones, only capable of making ripples. She wants to make a splash.
She wants to make waves. If only her words could trigger a rogue wave, the kind that appears out of nowhere, random and gigantic. She watched a documentary about rogue waves a few months ago. They are not caused by underwater earthquakes, like tsunamis. They are freakish and wild and—

“I just walked away,” Ralph says.

“Was it a rogue wave?” she says, expecting to have to explain this and liking how that feels. Usually there is no one there and her questions hang loose like the headmaster’s skinny arms.

“A what?”

“A rogue wave.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“They’re enormous waves that can appear on a calm sea with no warning or obvious cause. They’re very real, but I’m talking about them
metaphorically
, obviously.”

“I’m with you,” he says, lying and telling the truth. He is here with Miriam in a literal sense, but he is not following what she is saying. In an attempt to understand this woman with light-brown hair and enormous eyes, he thinks it over. Has his life been a calm sea until now? Has a rogue wave carried him here? Is there a clear explanation? Could this moment have been predicted? He glances at Miriam, who is leaning forward, drawing circles in the dirt with a stick. He feels maternal. Yes, definitely maternal, rather than paternal. The M is all-important and today it stands for Miriam, who sounds like she has laryngitis, who speaks ever so earnestly, who looks like a cross between a ten-year-old girl and a woman in her forties.

“How old are you?” he says. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I am thirty-five,” she says, beside the circles and circles.

“Are you from around here?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Repeating something doesn’t explain it.”

“Sometimes it does. Sometimes you hear a sentence for the second time and it just makes sense.”

“So what you’re saying is you’ve never lived anywhere else?”

“Yes, and I’ve never
been
anywhere else.”

“Not on holiday?”

“I’ve never been on holiday.”

“Seriously?”

She draws a hard line through the circles.

“Well that’s unusual,” he says.

A squirrel runs past. It stops, looks at them and runs off towards the trees. Miriam wonders what squirrels see when they look at a human being. Do they have strong or weak eyesight? She wonders if there is someone in the world who can answer that question, and what that person might be like, the one with all the answers about squirrels and their eyesight. She pictures a man in a tank top, watching nature from behind cupped hands held close to his mouth. She likes him. Then she remembers Google and Wikipedia, which can answer any question you throw at them, and the man in the tank top disappears. His absence leaves an effervescent pocket in her stomach. The pocket is called Jeffrey, who was murdered by Google and Wikipedia. What a way to go. What a ridiculous death. Poor Jeffrey.

“Are you all right?” Ralph asks.

She looks at his face again. The pointer on her faulty sincerity gauge has crept over to the right, to the orange area, which means seven out of ten.

Don’t be stupid, Miriam.

“I never know how to answer that question,” she says.

S
adie is asleep. Ever since the kiss with Kristin, she has found herself dozing off every time she sits down.

Ralph has left her. Her life has been a lie. All she wants to do is sleep and eat.

“You’re comfort eating,” says Stanley, watching his mother wake from her nap and resume a bowl of pasta.

“I’m not.”

“I think you are, Mum.”

“I’m hungry all the time. You don’t get that if you’re comfort eating. You just think of food without actually being hungry.”

Her hunger feels simple, unlike other kinds of appetite, especially the one she discovered three days ago in the cupboard on the landing.

Yesterday, Sadie visited a twenty-four-hour Tesco at three o’clock in the morning wearing flip-flops, shorts, a sweatshirt and no make-up. As she wandered around the aisles, she wondered why she had never done this before. Talk about liberation. Talk about the
ideal
time to shop—no traffic, no queues, just an
intriguing subsection of the general public, moving around in slow motion. She felt a sense of intimacy, as if the customers were members of a special night-time club, going about their business during the lull, the pause, before the commotion of daylight.

She looked at magazines, birthday cards, Lego.

She looked at Post-its, canned fish, frozen peppers. The idea of buying frozen sliced peppers had never occurred to her before. She threw six bags into her trolley.

“They’re incredibly handy aren’t they?”

Who was that? Wrong question, Sadie.
What
was that?

A giant panda.

I beg your pardon?

Holding a bag of frozen sprouts in one paw and a basket in the other.

“Sprouts in summer,” was all Sadie could think of to say.

“I like sprouts all year round,” the panda said.

“Have you come from a fancy-dress party?”

“No.”

“Are you collecting for charity?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Do you see?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

(Things have taken a cryptic turn among the frozen vegetables.)

“I watched a documentary the other day about the conservation of giant pandas,” Sadie said. “They’re actually quite stupid aren’t they?”

No answer.

“The conservationists were all wearing panda costumes to prepare baby pandas for the wild. You’d think they’d know wouldn’t you?”

The panda dropped the frozen sprouts into her shopping basket. Sadie wondered how often the costume got washed and whether it had to be taken to a launderette. She noticed a tear in the leg.

“A little shih-tzu,” the panda said, lifting her leg. “It was frightened.”

“Right.”

“I used to go on lots of foreign holidays, now I just do this. You’ve got to find your thing. No point throwing money down the drain.”

“What do you mean by
this
?”

The panda placed her basket on the floor and waved her front legs in the air: jazz paws. “I’m part of a group called EYI—Embrace Your Insomnia.”

All Sadie could think of was EIEIO. Old MacDonald had a—

“How interesting,” she said.

“Let me give you my card,” the panda said. She reached into a furry pocket, extracted a business card, handed it to Sadie. “Like I said, you just have to find your thing.”

“Lovely, thanks.”

“No problem. It was nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

The giant panda shuffled down the aisle.

I forgot to take a photo, thought Sadie. A Twitter reflex came and went and she continued her slow-motion shopping.

Forty minutes later, she was piling items onto a conveyor belt. She looked at the woman working the till, whose badge said “Hi I’m Belinda”.

“Quiet in here,” Belinda said.

“Isn’t it normally quiet at four-thirty in the morning?”

“It gets lonely,” Belinda said, hoping her manager wasn’t listening on some kind of hi-tech surveillance device. She was convinced that her uniform was bugged.

The two women stared at each other. For a few seconds they were united by an inexplicable sadness, as close as two people could be. Then came an announcement from a dislocated voice about two for the price of one on all Pantene shampoos.

“I’m sorry,” Sadie said.

“Ah well,” Belinda said. “Would you like cashback?”

“Where’ve you been?” asked Stanley, walking into the kitchen in his boxer shorts and slippers. “Have you been to the police?”

Sadie put her shopping on the breakfast bar. “The police?”

“About Dad.”

“Your father’s fine.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s just angry.”

“Mum, it’s been three days.”

“Three days is nothing. He’s at your grandparents’ house, sulking. Trust me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why should I trust you?”

Sadie put the kettle on and opened the fridge. “Because I’m your mother.”

“Why is he angry with you?”

“Not this again.”

“We deserve to know.”

She sighed. “This fridge is disgusting. Why am I the only one who’d ever notice? Why don’t you see it?”

“If Dad’s been murdered, you’re going to feel like crap.”

“Stanley,” she said, spinning around, “will you just drop it? You’re being melodramatic.”

“Why have you been to the supermarket in the middle of the night?”

“There was nothing to eat.”

“It’s because you’re sleeping in the daytime. You won’t feel tired at night if you sleep all day.”

Back in bed with a mug of tea, Stanley texted Joe.

Stanley loved the way that Joe never shortened words or used abbreviations in his messages. When they first started texting, he quickly discovered Joe’s penchant for correctness:

Could a relationship survive its infancy when one person wrote their texts as if they were formal letters and the other wrote B4 and U? The answer was no and Stanley knew it, so he modified his behaviour to impress. That’s what you do when you’re in love, he thought. You make small alterations.
You change your shape. But what if he couldn’t remember what shape he was in before? What if he ended up twisted like his parents?

After the party on Ralph’s birthday, when all the guests had gone home, Sadie sat in the back garden beside a flickering citronella candle and smoked a cigarette from a packet someone had left behind. Having a cigarette in her hand reminded her of being a student.

She smoked and wondered where Ralph had gone. She smoked and wished she had kissed Kristin Hart years ago, before her civil partnership to Carol, their honeymoon in Mauritius, their semi-detached Victorian house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, its walls lined with Kristin’s artwork, with photos of the two of them in Mauritius, San Francisco, Cornwall, Paris, Berlin, New Zealand. She wished she had realized how much she loved Alison Grabowski when she was still in her life. She could be dead by now. Or living in New York. She always went on about Manhattan, and how she wanted to live in a Greenwich Village apartment and walk a small dog in Central Park and fall in love with someone who liked street art, Japanese food, James Joyce. But she hadn’t kissed Kristin years ago or told Alison that she loved her. She was a wife and a mother with no real job or career. It was an insult to her intelligence, but who had delivered the insult? Funny how you can be shocked and sickened by your own life, when yesterday you were simply living it.

She closed her eyes and listened. A couple shouting, a bottle breaking. High heels on concrete. A bark, a whistle, a lorry rattling through green lights.

In the bathroom upstairs, she looked at herself in the mirror. She looked at the bruise on her face, the new spot on her chin, the lines and the smudged mascara. “For fuck’s sake,” she said, pulling a cleansing wipe from a packet. She sat cross-legged on the floor, wiping her face, as Harvey squeezed through the crack in the door and jumped on top of her. “Not now, Harv,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “Not now,” she whispered, pulling him close.